In the early 1980s, Mark Stutrud was a supervisor at an adolescent chemical dependency program in Minnesota, a role he once described as “classic middle management with a lot of responsibility but no authority.” Frustrated and looking for a way out that wasn’t medical or graduate school, Stutrud began to dream the impossible dream of... View Article
The toll-free number popped up on Samuel Adams six-packs in 1995. Consumers who were at least 21 years old could call it and get in on the initial public offering, due that November, for the beer’s parent brewery, Boston Beer: 33 shares per caller at $15 each, or $495 total. Boston Beer’s IPO, which indeed... View Article
David Geary was in his late 30s, recently unemployed as a medical-supplies salesman, and unenthusiastic about sending out résumés. So he turned to beer. Specifically, David and wife Karen filed incorporation papers with the State of Maine in October 1983 for the D.L. Geary Brewing Co. in Portland. The following winter, David Geary left New... View Article
“My name really is Michael Jackson, but I don’t sing and I don’t drink Pepsi. I drink beer.” And thus commenced the Stateside run of The Beer Hunter television series that the English beer critic Michael Jackson hosted. The first of the six episodes, “The Burgundies of Belgium,” aired on the Discovery Channel on Thursday,... View Article
One September evening in 1985, in the lower level of an aged-looking hotel off DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., that charged $60 nightly for a room, a schoolteacher from Bethesda, Maryland, named Bob Tupper stepped to a microphone and told those assembled about the first beer of the night: Tsingtao from China. Thus commenced a... View Article
In 1988, the Water Street Brewery of Milwaukee won a silver medal in the “European darks” category of the Great American Beer Festival. The winning beer? Water Street Oktoberfest. The following year the festival added a Vienna/Marzen/Octoberfest category, a nod to what was by then becoming a major presence every late summer and early autumn... View Article
How to ruin an evening with a beer geek: (Step 1) Define “craft beer” and “craft brewer” using the industry standard. (Step 2) Yield nothing. That has pretty much been the way of things since the fall of 2005, when the board of the Brewers Association, the Boulder, Colorado-based trade group representing the interests of... View Article
In early 1968, Robert Mondavi and his eponymous Napa Valley winery were in trouble. Its production had grown steadily from its 1966 launch as the first significant new winery in America’s most ballyhooed winemaking region. Plus, Mondavi had gained all-important critical plaudits for his Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon in particular, which some said held their... View Article
A teenage Larry Bell first discovered a wider world of beer in the mid-1970s when his older brother, who lived in Washington, D.C., snuck him into that city’s old Brickskeller restaurant, which then held the Guinness world record for most commercially available beers (1,072). By 1980, the 22-year-old Bell, a native of the Chicago area,... View Article
